Please join us every other Wednesday at Twin Oaks Farm in Longmont, CO for the FEARLESS VICTORY program

Veterans Peace of Mind is offering a program to veterans combining Mindfulness Meditation with Equine-Assisted Therapy for Veterans and Active Duty Service Members at Twin Oaks Farm in Longmont, CO. We meet every other Wednesday from 12:00 Noon to 2:00 PM.

We will practice meditation, participate in discussions, and enjoy fresh air, sunshine and the companionship of horses (and llamas too!)

Our own mind is our own worst enemy. We try to focus, and our mind wanders off. We try to keep stress at bay, but anxiety keeps us awake at night. Training our mind through peaceful abiding mindfulness, we can create an alliance that allows us to actually use our mind, rather than be used by it.

— Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into an Ally

Many scientific studies at this point have verified the value of mindfulness for stress-reduction, emotional well-being, improved health, and other benefits. Veterans’ Peace of Mind uses a variety of mindfulness-based techniques to “dis-empower” the triggers of trauma, exercising choice as to whether or not they allow the triggers to escalate and run away with them. Learning to let go of afflictive emotions and obsessive thinking in this way relaxes stress and invites a healthier, more joyful experience of life. When the mind isn’t cluttered with a lot of thoughts, its true nature is cheerful. Horses facilitate mindfulness naturally.

Veterans Peace of Mind is now offering Mindfulness Meditation sessions for Veterans and Active Duty Service Members at the Shambhala Meditation Center in Denver, located at 2305 S Syracuse Wy, Ste. 214, Denver, CO 80231.

We meet every other Wednesday from 12:00 Noon to 2:00 pm. See this calendar for current meeting information.

We will practice meditation, participate in discussions, and offer friendly support.

Our own mind is our own worst enemy. We try to focus, and our mind wanders off. We try to keep stress at bay, but anxiety keeps us awake at night. Training our mind through peaceful abiding mindfulness, we can create an alliance that allows us to actually use our mind, rather than be used by it.

— Sakyong Mipham, Turning the Mind Into an Ally

Many scientific studies at this point have verified the value of mindfulness for stress-reduction, emotional well-being, improved health, and other benefits. Veterans’ Peace of Mind uses a variety of mindfulness-based techniques to “dis-empower” the triggers of trauma, exercising choice as to whether or not they allow the triggers to escalate and run away with them. Learning to let go of afflictive emotions and obsessive thinking in this way relaxes stress and invites a healthier, more joyful experience of life. When the mind isn’t cluttered with a lot of thoughts, its true nature is cheerful.

During long road trips when I was a kid, instead of switching on the radio my father sang, sometimes accompanied my mother. My brother had left home, so it was just me in the back, behind a blanket strung from door to door, pretending I was on a pirate ship headed for China, doing my best to blot out my father’s off-key warbling. Bernie was not a happy man, but his repertoire had a single theme: Happy Days Are Here Again, Smile (though your heart is breaking) and Put On A Happy Face topped his hit parade.

My mother wasn’t any happier than my father, but it was as if she had drunk the same cultural Kool-Aid as he. They both had got the message that happiness is the only worthy emotion. The rest—anger, disappointment, fear, sorrow—were signs of a weak character. Shameful. I got the message, too. Like so many Westerners, especially Americans, we believed we were supposed to be happy all the time—as far as I can tell, the number one, surefire predictor of misery.Read More

This is an audio recording of Gary Allen, Education Director for the Mindfulness Peace Project, discussing Buddhist practice in American prisons at the American Theological Librarians Association Conference in Denver, CO, in June 2015.

2.4 million veterans served in Afghanistan and Iraq. 1 in 5 suffer from PTSD or severe depression. Half of these veterans have been incarcerated at some point since serving in these wars. 22 veterans of the most recent wars committed suicide each day of last year. Read more…

New York has agreed to a major overhaul in the way solitary confinement is administered in the state’s prisons, with the goal of significantly reducing the number of inmates held in isolation, cutting the maximum length of stay and improving their living conditions. Read more…

Like everyone else, I have been pondering the significance and aftermath of the recent mass shooting in San Bernadino, CA. It hits close to home—literally, in my case, as I was born and grew up in Riverside, just 15 miles from San Bernadino. Among the questions that come to my mind is, What is an appropriate or effective response as a Buddhist?

Since such an event evokes strong visceral emotions, including fear, I thought it might be helpful to report some facts about gun violence in America I have gleaned from my recent readings. Some of these are rather counterintuitive. For example, in the last 30 years the overall incidence of gun violence has dropped rather dramatically. Read more…

Not too long ago, most of us thought that the brain we’re born with is static—that after a certain age, the neural circuitry cards we’re dealt are the only ones we can play long-term.

Fast-forward a decade or two, and we’re beginning to see the opposite: the brain is designed to adapt constantly. World-renowned neuroscientist Richie Davidson at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, along with this colleagues, want us to know three things: 1) you can train your brain to change, 2) that the change is measurable, and 3) new ways of thinking can change it for the better. Read more here…

Before he was exonerated of murder and released in 2010, Anthony Graves spent 18 years locked up in a Texas prison, 16 of them all alone in a tiny cell.

Actually, he does not count it that way. He counts his time in solitary confinement as “60 square feet, 24 hours a day, 6,640 days.” The purpose, Mr. Graves came to conclude, was simple. “It is designed to break a man’s will to live,” he said in an interview.

An estimated 75,000 state and federal prisoners are held in solitary confinement in the United States, and for the first time in generations, leaders are rethinking the practice. President Obama last week ordered a Justice Department review of solitary confinement while Congress and more than a dozen states consider limits on it. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, in a Supreme Court ruling last month, all but invited a constitutional challenge. Read more here…